Nintendo has been making a big push with its WiiWare game and application download service for the Wii. Over 200 programs have been developed, although most are not available in North America or Europe.

One of the biggest complaints has been the lack of storage available. The Wii only has 512 MB of internal NAND flash storage, and many of Nintendo's best WiiWare customers were forced to transfer their programs onto 2GB SD cards or delete unused programs in order to make room for new ones.

While all programs that were bought are available for redownloading later, the inconvenience and awkwardness of the experience left many customers disappointed.

Nintendo has now released System Menu 4.0, a major update to the Wii's operating system. It now supports SDHC cards up to a maximum of 32GB, integrating it into the Wii so that Virtual Console or WiiWare games can be played directly off external flash storage.

There is a new SD Card menu accessible from the main menu, next to the Wii button. It was designed to facilitate transfers of files and Channels between the Wii console and SD or SDHC cards.

One of the fastest cards SDHC cards available is the SanDisk Extreme III 30MB/s Edition. It is available in 2, 4, 8, and 16 GB versions. There are many cheap SD and SDHC cards available, but many users are choosing faster flash storage rather than large capacities. Most of the fastest SDHC cards are used for digital cameras, and users who are purchasing larger and faster storage may have several cards leftover that they can use as storage for the Wii.

Sales of the Wii console have exceeded 50 million globally, while the Wii Fit has sold over 15 million units.

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